What is the difference between "mutation" and "crossover"?
The mutation is an operation that is applied to a single individual in the population. It can e.g. introduce some noise in the chromosome. For example, if the chromosomes are binary, a mutation may simply be the flip of a bit (or gene).
The crossover is an operation which takes as input two individuals (often called the &quot;parents&quot;) and somehow combines their chromosomes, so as to produce usually two other chromosomes (the &quot;children&quot;), which inherit, in a certain way, the genes of both parents.
For more details about these operations, you can use the book Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning by David E. Goldberg (who is an expert in genetic algorithms and was just advised by John H. Holland). You can also take a look at the book Computational Intelligence: An Introduction (2nd edition, 2007) by Andries P. Engelbrecht.